Cluster technologies have been provided to associate physical nodes, such as servers, together in a cluster. Applications and services running on the cluster may be configured to fail over gracefully using functionality made available via the cluster technology. One example of such cluster technology is Microsoft® Cluster Services (MSCS). Cluster nodes may have shared access to resources used to provide access to applications and services, such as a cluster shared volume (CSV) or other shared drive/storage. Virtualization technologies, e.g., virtual machines, may be used to provide access to applications and/or services via a cluster.
A current method of protecting (backing up data on) a cluster is to back up the physical and virtual machines individually. A backup administrator has to create individual client resources for both virtual clients and physical cluster nodes. All these individual cluster nodes may need to be added to a ‘Remote Access’ section of the virtual client resource. This way of configuring the cluster clients is tedious and time consuming for medium and large sized cluster environments. In addition, physical nodes may end up getting backed up on a different schedule that virtual resources, which may complicate recovery from a catastrophic failure.